Molotov cocktails.....that is so stupid, they should be thrown out of school for even "thinking" that was a good idea. My vote: kick them out of school. If so, I promise, you'll never see another student do that again. It pains me to even write "student."

I doubt this goes to trial. If they settle or plea a lesser charge, do you boot them out? I would. If you ever wanted a textbook definition of gross negligence, playing with Molotov cocktails may be it. Regardless this is fucking ludicrous that we are talking about Michigan students throwing around flaming bombs. This isn't Will Campbell doing a dukes of hazard slide. This probably wasn't the "wow" factor that Brandon was going for with the athletic department.

I think what he is saying is that you are confusing plea bargain with settlement. I settlement is where you agree to something outside of court. A plea bargain is where you agree to a lesser charge in exchange for pleading guilty.

I think my verbiage was not clear. Apologies. I appreciate your response. I've been practicing for over 15 years. Sometimes terms in my head don't come out so clearly in my post. I wholeheartedly agree with you lads. Cheers

It's cool. I'm married to an attorney and her brain gets all jumbled up from thinking all week. Luckily, I have one of those jobs where I don't have to use my brain so I write on MGoBlog and play sudoku to keep from getting Alzheimer's.

But these kids are not going to get kicked out of school. I believe this was a four-year felony charge. Depending on what they have on their records respectively, they would likely plead to a 762.11 (HYTA).

Kids make mistakes. Do they deserve to continue on the wrestling team? that's up to the AD, but they should not be expelled from the University.

They will 100% get HYTA and plead down but I think you are underselling what they did. Kids make mistakes is something you can say for smoking weed, getting drunk, shit even stealing the laptop of a person you have a problem with. Making a molotov cocktail is seriously dangersous, you aren't just making that because you can't find where to buy a firework and you are putting a lot of people in danger if you set it off anywhere near other people.

judge these kids until all the facts come out. Was it a 1 liter coke bottle full of gas to take to their grandmother's house so they could start her snowblower and clean out the entire Retirement home instead of watching the BB game?

Lets face it. Everyone lies including the police. So I want to see the facts before I start kicking kids off the team and removing them from school.

You've done worse and seen other students do worse? I'm sorry but we must have traveled in different circles. Lighting a car on fire is less of a danger to society than this shti, there is a reason it is a 4 year felony charge.

I think offenses like this are empty and misleading without given context...namely intent.

As an undergrad, I sometimes made "molotov cocktails" with pharmacology grad students. We'd fill pyrex with 95% EtOH, soak in a makeshift wick, and light. Our intent was too damage NOTHING. We even would have been sad if our pyrex vessels had burst. We just wanted to sit outside MSRBIII with a Two Hearted Ale each and watch a few geeky candles glow for those forty-five seconds near midnight. Admonish me as you will, but I never thought that was a big deal. And if these wrestler guys NEVER intended to damage anything, just light a novel candle (which seems to me perhaps improbable but doubtlessly conceivable), then I'm on their side and am sad to see the misleading characterization of a benignly intended event turn out so poorly for them. If, however, they intended to damage anything in my dear Ann Arbor, then eff them. I leave it to the courts to discern which is which. For now, none of this is clear enough to have me pick sides.

While I agree with you in that "boys will be boys and like to light shit on fire", they appear to have used them to light mattresses on fire. Activity like this is usually frowned upon when down in the City limits.

Just because one group did something without any intent doesn't preclude another from having that intent. If you and a few friends had a grenade and just wanted to figure out how it worked by observing it in a controlled environment, does that mean every group of kids walking around with a grenade has no intent and shouldn't be liable of possessing an illegal firearm or whatever a grenade is considered?

This is not the first time members of the wrestling team have been involved with molotov cocktails. There was an incident last summer as well. I'm not saying it was the same guys, but it was definitely wrestlers, and the AD was involved in the resolution.

Thank you for the athletic contributions you made as members of the wrestling team. However, it's time for both of you to get the heck out of here. It's bad enough when fans react this way, but when student athletes are involved, it's an embarrassment to the university. You don't deserve the honor of representing this university when you do stupid (and potentially dangerous) shit like this.

I can't imagine that had like full-on I'm Rioting Brah moldovs but probably something close enough that they thought would be hilarious. Well they're in deep crap now. Jail time has to be possible, but I'd be surprised if they end up there

From the story itself, the most likely scenario seems like these two geniuses went to the gas station and filled some bottles with gasoline, and used one on a mattress in the middle of the street. It takes more than "a bottle with some sort of flammable liquid in it" to make a Molotov cocktail, and if the police found such a bottle near the mattress, that suggests it probably wasn't used as a Molotov cocktail, but just a container used to pour the flammable liquid out of, with some left in the bottle. It's still idiotic, it's still against the law, they still deserve punishment, but the whole Molotov cocktail angle may very well be a stretch.

Pfannes said the mattress fire was extinguished when police arrived, but officers who arrived on the scene that morning located a bottle with some sort of flammable liquid in it, popularly known as a Molotov cocktail. The subsequent investigation linked the two men to "up to four" of them, Pfannes said.

The words potentially dangerous are thrown around these days as an indictment. Driving a moped is potentially dangerous, a car, a truck, a bicycle, swimming, drinking etc. This is definitely stupid on their part but they are Michigan men currently and we shouldn't be so quick to banish them. Intent is a key factor when judging "potentially dangerous " situations. They don't seem to have actually hurt anyone, I highly doubt they had any intent to hurt anyone. Give them their day in court.

Or do you think students who let people swim in their pool should be kicked out of school? That's potentially dangerous! I suppose if alcohol is involved in the swimming that should be immediate expulsion because that's potentially dangerous and irresponsible. I'm rather sure every one of us has attended a pool party in our life, I'm sure you see where I'm leading so....

Let it play out. It's most likely a very stupid but ultimately harmless mistake. Punish them so they learn but throwing two kids lives away over something that hurt nobody is a potentially dangerous precedent.

Intent in and of itself can be considered a crime. Therefore, having intent to do harm or damage makes a situation that much more serious. However, intent is not always required to make or break a situation from being criminal or not, nor does it make it any less stupid. Also, there are varying levels of intent: while they may not have had intent to cause any damage whatsoever, they may have had intent to eventually explode the cocktails, which could be enough right there to make their possession criminal.

Intending to possess them in the first place is probably enough for a felony. Look at drug crimes; intending to hold a prohibited substance in your hand is often enough to be convicted of a felony drug crime. I assume this could be the same. No explosive intent necessary.

You would kind of have a point if the charge was "doing something potentially dangerous." Instead, it's "possessing/manufacturing explosives." The risks posed by Molotov Cocktails are not comparable to the day-to-day risks you tried to make an analogy to. And all of that aside, I don't really care if they planned out a controlled detonation in an abandoned mall parking lot all on their own, it's still illegal to do so. There will be no day in court, they'll undoubtedly plead down to something.

Why should we give them the benefit of the doubt because they are michigan men? would this be your response if you read the exact same story about another teams players? This type of mentality is dumb as shit, if someone fucks up they fucked up, doesn't matter where they went to school.

How about if we give them the benefit of a doubt because nothing has been proven yet?

All the article says is that they are "linked" to something called a molotov cocktail, which as described, isn't a molotov cocktail. The government makes mistakes all the time and as the prosecutor of Duke's lacrosse team showed, and as the IRS is currently showing, sometimes government does things because it has malicious agents.

I don't think this is a stupid college kid stunt. Stupid yes but they are old enough to reason. You don't make explosives for fun. These two idiots had bigger intentions. I hope they get the book thrown at them.

Really? People make explosives for fun all the time. And, there is nothing, other than the claim that these were Molotov cocktails to suggest that their intent was anything other than to burn shit in the middle of the street, but yeah that is similar to pressure cooker bombs laced with shrapnel set off in a crowd of people.

I also witnessed at least a couple instances of wrestlers acting like D-bags when I was in school. Still remember my senior year walking down South U. and watching a car load of wrestlers hanging out the window making fun of a couple fat chicks. Then a block up swerved into a puddle trying to soak a couple other people on the sidewalk.

I know anyone and not just wrestlers could have done these things, but in my own personal observations, the wrestlers were always the big mouths at the bars and parties around campus. Thus this news didn't shock me in the least.

Awhile back didn't some MSU people make a bomb? This is similarly reckless and stupid. Just no real excuse for making them, even if they were just laying around. Just laying around until used for something.